Selling art from the heart

Colin Laverty is selling about 300 pieces from his collection.
Photo: Michele Mossop

by
Brook Turner

In a major coup for Bonhams, senior consultant Tim Klingender has secured what the auction house is billing as the biggest single-owner contemporary art auction ever in this country, the $4 million to $6 million 2013 sale of a significant tranche of the Colin and Elizabeth Laverty ­collection.

The couple, founders of the Laverty pathology business that was sold to Mayne Health in 1998 (and subsequently sold on to Primary Health Care), have been renowned collectors of indigenous art for 30 years, often from the remote communities where it was minted or the commercial shows where it debuted.

Medical practitioner Dr Colin Laverty in fact started collecting contemporary Australian artists, particularly abstract artists including Tony Tuckson, in the 1960s. The collection now spans indigenous and non-indigenous art and totals more than 2000 pieces worth between $12 million and $14 million.

About 300 of those works will be sold as part of what Elizabeth Laverty characterised this week an exercise in downsizing, not least after her husband’s recent illness, for which he is under­going treatment.

“We love all our paintings. We collected from the heart, but there’s just so much work and so much of it in storage," she tells The Australian Financial Review. “Some things don’t go up on the walls for years. It’s time to set them free."

In what Klingender says is a first for Australian contemporary art, the auction will be previewed internationally in London and New York as well as Melbourne prior to the March 24 sale at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

A number of the collection’s early Papunya boards, some of the earliest indigenous works the couple acquired, are on loan to Paris’s Musée du quai Branly as part of the Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art show. About 400 works have been lent to local galleries, including for two shows at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery and successive Sydney Biennales.

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More than 130 works have been lent to international museums and, as the overseas previews suggest, Klingender expects significant offshore interest. “We know half the market for indigenous work is international."

The couple collected early and in depth. They hold 35 Peter Booths (an early Colin Laverty favourite) and 22 William Robinsons (Whisson was a later Elizabeth Laverty favourite), of which four will be sold.

“This isn’t a complete overview of contemporary art in the last 30 years, but it certainly provides an overview of the artists of whom they are ­enamoured," Klingender says.

Last year’s sale of the Ann Lewis collection – or its remnants after the philanthropist’s extensive donations to public galleries – for $3.4 million against a $2.1 million estimate showed how popular single-owner sales can be in even a difficult climate.

“In this case, the Lavertys are selling a lot of iconic and high-value works," Klingender says. “They’ve decided it is time to streamline a vast collection to make it easier for eventually their children to manage."

As for selling part of one of the country’s pre-eminent indigenous art collections in an at best schizophrenic indigenous art market, Klingender is sanguine: “Great works will still always fetch fantastic prices and there are a number of really major masterworks in this collection by very senior artists with extraordinary exhibition histories."

How did Bonhams secure the sale? The house has regularly valued the collection, says Klingender, who has known the collectors since the early 1990s when, he says, he’d “get off a plane in a remote community only to find the Lavertys getting on to one ahead of me".